[EXTRACT FROM CONGRESSIONAL RECORD OP AUGUST 13, 1912] 



ADDRESS 

OF 

HON. WOODROW WILSON 

GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY 
IN THE 

AUDITORIUM, DENVER, COLO. 

ON THE OCCASION OF THE TERCENTENARY 
CELEBRATION OF THE TRANSLATION OF 
THE BIBLE INTO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 
MAY 7, 1911 




WASHINGTON 
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 
1912 

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ADDEESS 

or 

HOW. WOODROW WILSON. 



Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, the thought that entered 
my mind first as I came into this great room this evening framed 
itself in a question, Why should this great body of people have 
come together upon this solemn night? There is nothing here 
to be seen. There is nothing delectable here to be heard. Why 
should you run together in a great host when all that is to be 
spoken of is the history of a familiar book? 

But as I have sat and looked upon this great body of people 
I have thought of the very suitable circumstance that here upon 
the platform sat a little group of ministers of the gospel lost in 
this great throng. 

I say the " suitable circumstance," for I come here to-night 
to speak of the Bible as the book of the people, not the book of 
the minister of the gospel, not the special book of the priest from 
which to set forth some occult, unknown doctrine withheld from 
the common understanding of men, but a great book of revela- 
tion — the people's book of revelation. For it seems to me that 
the Bible has revealed the people to themselves. I wonder how 
many persons in this great audience realize the significance for 
English-speaking peoples of the translation of the Bible into the 
English tongue. Up to the time of the translation of the Bible 
into English, it was a book for long ages withheld from the 
perusal of the peoples of other languages and of other tongues, 
and not a little of the history of liberty lies in the circumstance 
that the moving sentences of this book were made familiar to 
the ears and the understanding of those peoples who have led 
mankind in exhibiting the forms of government and the im- 
pulses of reform which have made for freedom and for self- 
government among mankind. 

For this is a book which reveals men unto themselves, not as 
creatures in bondage, not as men under human authority, not 
as those bidden to take counsel and command of any human 
source. It reveals every man to himself as a distinct moral 
agent, responsible not to men, not even to those men whom he 
has put over him in authority, but responsible through his own 
conscience to his Lord and Maker. Whenever a man sees this 
vision he stands up a free man, whatever may be the government 
under which he lives, if he sees beyond the circumstances of 
his own life. 

I heard a very eloquent sermon to-day from an honored gen- 
tleman who is with us to-night. He was speaking upon the 
effect of a knowledge of the future life upon our conduct in 
this life. And it seemed to me that as I listened to him I saw 
the flames of those fires rekindled at which the martyrs died — • 
died forgetful of their pain, with praise and thanksgiving upon 
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their lips, that they had the opportunity to render their testi- 
rnoney that this was not the life for which they had lived, but 
that there was a house builded in the heavens, not built of men, 
but built of God, to the vision of which they had lifted their 
eyes as they passed through the world, which gave them courage 
to fear no man, but to serve God. And I thought that all the 
records of heroism, of the great things that had illustrated 
human life, were summed up in the power of men to see that 
vision. 

Our present life, ladies and gentlemen, is a very imperfect and 
disappointing thing. We do not judge our own conduct in the 
privacy of our own closets by the standard of expediency by 
which we are daily and hourly governed. We know that there 
is a standard set for us in the heavens, a standard revealed to 
us in this book which is the fixed and eternal standard by 
which we judge ourselves, and as we read this book it seems 
to us that the pages of our own hearts are laid open before us 
for our own perusal. This is the people's book of revelation, 
revelation of themselves not alone, but revelation of life and 
of peace. You know that human life is a constant struggle. 
For a man who has lost the sense of struggle life has ceased. 

I believe that my confidence in the judgment of the people in 
matters political is based upon my knowledge that the men 
who are struggling are the men who know; that the men who 
are in the midst of the great effort to keep themselves steady in 
the pressure and rush of life are the men who know the sig- 
nificance of the pressure and the rush of life, and that they, the 
men on the make, are the men to whom to go for your judg- 
ments of what life is and what its problems are. And in this 
book there is peace simply because we read here the object of 
the struggle. No man is satisfied with himself as the object 
of the struggle. 

There is a very interesting phrase that constantly comes to 
our lips which we perhaps do not often enough interpret in its 
true meaning. We see many a young man start out in life with 
apparently only this object in view — to make name and fame 
and power for himself, and there comes a time of maturity 
and reflection when we say of him, " He has come to himself." 
When may I say that I have come to myself? Only when I 
have come to recognize my true relations with the rest of the 
world. We speak of a man losing himself in a desert. If you 
reflect a moment you will see that is the only thing he has not 
lost. He himself is there. What he means when he says that 
he has lost himself is that he has lost all the rest of the world. 
He has nothing to steer by. He does not know where any 
human habitation lies. He does not know where any beaten 
path and highway is. If he could establish his relationship 
with anything else in the world he would have found himself. 
Let it serve as a picture. 

A man has found himself when he has found his relation to 
the rest of the universe, and here is the book in which those 
relations are set forth. And so when you see a man going 
along the highways of life with his gaze lifted above the road, 
lifted to the sloping ways in front of him, then be careful of 
that man and get out of his way. He knows the kingdom for 
which he is bound. He has seen the revelation of himself and 
of his relations to mankind. He has seen the revelations of 
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4 



his relation to God and his Maker, and therefore he has seen 
his responsibility in the world. This is the revelation of life 
and of peace. I do not know that peace lies in constant accom- 
modation. I was once asked if I would take part in a great 
peace conference, and I said, "Yes; if I may speak in favor 
of war " — not the war which we seek to avoid, not the senseless 
and useless and passionate shedding of human blood, but the 
only war that brings peace, the war with human passions and 
the war with human wrong — the war which is that untiring and 
unending process of reform from which no man can refrain and 
get peace. 

No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare 
against wrong and get peace out of his acquiescence. The most 
solid and satisfying peace is that which comes from this con- 
stant spiritual warfare, and there are times in the history of 
nations when they must take up the crude instruments of blood- 
shed in order to vindicate spiritual conceptions. For liberty is 
a spiritual conception, and when men take up arms to set other 
men free, there is something sacred and holy in the warfare. 
I will not cry " peace " so long as there is sin and wrong in the 
world. And this great book does not teach any doctrine of 
peace so long as there is sin to be combated and overcome in 
one's own heart and in the great moving force of human 
society. 

And so it seems to me that we must look upon the Bible as 
the great charter of the human soul — as the " Magna Charta " 
of the human soul. You know the interesting circumstances 
which gave rise to the Magna Charta. You know the moving 
scene that was enacted upon the heath at Runnymede. You 
know how the barons of England, representing the people of 
England — for they consciously represented the people of Eng- 
land — met upon that historic spot and parleyed with John, the 
King. They said, " We will come to terms with you here." 
They said, " There are certain inalienable rights of English- 
speaking men which you must observe. They are not given by 
you, they can not be taken away by you. Sign your name here 
to this parchment upon which these rights are written and we 
are your subjects. Refuse to put your name to this document 
and we are your sworn enemies. Here are our swords to 
prove it." 

The franchise of human liberty made the basis of a bargain 
with a king. There are kings upon the pages of Scripture, but 
do you think of any king in Scripture as anything else than a 
mere man? There was the great King David, of a line blessed 
because the line from which should spring our Lord and 
Savior, a man marked in the history of mankind as the chosen 
instrument of God to do justice and exalt righteousness in the 
people. 

But what does this Bible do for David? Does it utter 
eulogies upon him? Does it conceal his faults and magnify his 
virtues? Does it set him up as a great statesman would be set 
up in a modern biography? No; the book in which his annals 
are written strips the mask from David, strips every shred of 
counterfeit and concealment from him and shows him as indeed 
an instrument of God, but a sinful and selfish man, and the 
verdict of the Bible is that David, like other men, was one 
day to stand naked before the judgment seat of God and be 
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judged not as a king but as a man. Is not this the book of the 
people? Is there any man in this Holy Scripture who is ex- 
empted from the common standard and judgment? How these 
pages teem with the masses of mankind. Are these the annals 
of the great? These are the annals of the people — of the com- 
mon run of men. 

The New Testament is the history of the life and the testi- 
mony of common men who rallied to the fellowship of Jesus 
Christ and who by their faith and preaching remade a world 
that was under the thrall of the Roman army. This is the his- 
tory of the triumph of the human spirit, in the persons of 
humble men. And how many sorts of men march across the 
pages, how infinite is the variety of human circumstance and 
of human dealings and of human heroism and love ! Is this a 
picture of extraordinary thiugs? This is a picture of the com- 
mon life of mankind. It is a mirror held up for men's hearts, 
and it is in this mirror that we marvel to see ourselves portrayed. 

How like to the Scripture is all great literature ! What is it 
that entrances us when we read or witness a play of Shakes- 
peare? It is the consciousness that this man, this all-observing 
mind, saw men of every cast and kind as they were in their 
habits, as they lived. And as passage succeeds passage we seem 
to see the characters of ourselves and our friends portrayed by 
this ancient writer, and a play of Shakespeare is just as modern 
to-day as upon the day it was penned and first enacted. And 
the Bible is without age or date or time. It is a picture of the 
human heart displayed for all ages and for all sorts and condi- 
tions of men. Moreover, the Bible does what is so invaluable 
in human life — it classifies moral values. It apprises us that 
men are not judged according to their wits, but according to 
their characters — that the last of every man's reputation is his 
truthfulness, his squaring his conduct with the standards that 
he knew to be the standards of purity and rectitude. 

How many a man we appraise, ladies and gentlemen, as great 
to-day whom we do not admire as noble! A man may have 
great power and small character. And the sweet praise of man- 
kind lies not in their admiration of the smartness with which 
the thing was accomplished, but in that lingering love which 
apprises men that one of their fellows has gone out of life to 
his own reckoning, where he is sure of the blessed verdict, 
" Well done, good and faithful servant." 

Did you ever look about you in any great city, in any great 
capital, at the statues which have been erected in it? To whom 
are these statues erected? Are they erected to the men who 
have piled fortunes about them? I do not know of any such 
statue anywhere, unless after he had accumulated his fortune 
the man bestowed it in beneficence upon his fellow men, and 
alongside of him will stand a statue of another meaning, for it 
is easy to give money away. I heard a friend of mine say that 
the standard of generosity was not the amount you gave away, 
but the amount you had left. It is easy to give away of your 
abundance ; but look at the next statue, the next statue, and the 
next in the market place of great cities, and whom will you see? 
You will see here a soldier who gave his life to serve, not his 
own ends, but the interests and the purposes of his country. 

I would be the last, ladies and gentlemen, to disparage any 
of the ordinary occupations of life, but I want to ask you this 
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question: Did you ever see anybody who had lost a son hang 
up his yardstick over the mantelpiece? Have you not seen 
many families who had lost their sons hang up their muskets 
and their swords over the mantelpiece? What is the difference 
between the yardstick and the musket? There is nothing but 
perfect honor in the use of the yardstick, but the yardstick 
was used for the man's own interest, for his own self-support. 
It was used merely to fulfill the necessary exigencies of life, 
whereas the musket was used to serve no possible purpose of 
his own. He took every risk without any possibility of profit. 
The musket is the symbol of self-sacrifice and the yardstick is 
not. A man will instinctively elevate the one as the symbol 
of honor and never dreaui of using the other as a symbol of 
distinction. 

Doesn't that cut pretty deep, and don't you know why the 
soldier has his monument as against the civilian's? The civilian 
may have served his State — he also — and here and there you 
may see a statesman's statue, but the civilian has generally 
served his country — has often served his country, at any rate — 
with some idea of promoting his own interests, whereas the sol- 
dier has everything to lose and nothing but the gratitude of his 
fellow men to win. 

Let every man pray that he may in some true sense be a sol- 
dier of fortune, that he may have the good fortune to spend 
his energies and his life in the service of his fellow men in 
order that he may die to be recorded upon the rolls of those 
who have not thought of themselves but have thought of those 
whom they served. Isn't this the lesson of our Lord and Savior 
Jesus Christ? Am I not reminding you of these common judg- 
ments of our life, simply expounding to you this book of revela- 
tion, this book which reveals the common man to himself, which 
strips life of its disguises and its pretenses and elevates those 
standards by which alone true greatness and true strength and 
true valor are assessed? 

Do you wonder, therefore, that when I was asked what my 
theme this evening would be I said it would be " The Bible and 
Progress"? We do not judge progress by material standards. 
America is not ahead of the other nations of the world because 
she is rich. Nothing makes America great except her thoughts, 
except her ideals, except her acceptance of those standards of 
judgment which are written large upon these pages of revela- 
tion. America has all along claimed the distinction of setting 
this example to the civilized world — that men were to think of 
one another, that governments were to be set up for the service 
of the people, that men were to be judged by these moral stand- 
ards which pay no regard to rank or birth or conditions, but 
which assess every man according to his single and individual 
value. This is the meaning of this charter of the human soul. 
This is the standard by which men and nations have more and 
more come to be judged. And so the form has consisted in 
nothing more nor less than this — in trying to conform actual 
conditions, in trying to square actual laws with the right judg- 
ments of human conduct and more than liberty. 

That is the reason that the Bible has stood at the back of 
progress. That is the reason that reform has come not from 
the top but from the bottom. If you are ever tempted to let a 
government reform itself, I ask you to look back in the pages 

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of history and find me a government that reformed itself. If 
you are ever tempted to let a party attempt to reform itself, I 
ask you to find a party that ever reformed itself. 

A tree is not nourished by its bloom and by its fruit. It is 
nourished by its roots, which are down deep in the common and 
hidden soil, and every process of purification and rectification 
comes from the bottom — not from the top. It comes from the 
masses of struggling human beings. It comes from the instinc- 
tive efforts of millions of human hearts trying to beat their 
way up into the light and into the hope of the future. 

Parlies are reformed and governments are corrected by the 
impulses coming out of the hearts of those who never exercised 
authority and never organized parties. Those are the sources 
of strength, and I pray God that these sources may never cease 
to be spiritualized by the immortal subjections of these words 
of inspiration of the Bible. 

If any statesman sunk in the practices which debase a na- 
tion will but read this single book, he will go to his prayers 
abashed. Do you not realize, ladies and gentlemen, that there 
is a whole literature in the Bible? It is not one book, but a 
score of books. Do you realize what literature is? I am some- 
times sorry to see the great classics of our English literature 
used in the schools as textbooks, because I am afraid that little 
children may gain the impression that these are formal lessons 
to be learned. There is no great book in any language, ladies 
and gentlemen, that is not the spontaneous outpouring of some 
great mind on the cry of some great heart. And the reason 
that poetry moves us more than prose does is that it is the 
rhythmic and passionate voice of some great spirit that has 
seen more than his fellow men can see. 

I have found more true politics in the poets of the English- 
speaking race than I have ever found in all the formal treatises 
on political science. There is more of the spirit of our own 
institutions in a few lines of Tennyson than in all the textbooks 
on governments put together : 

A nation still, the rules and the ruled, 

Some sense of duty, something of a faith, 

Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made, 

Some patient force to change them when we will, 

Some civic manhood firm against the crowd. 

Can you find summed up the manly, self -helping spirit of 
Saxon liberty anywhere better than in those few lines? Men 
afraid of nobody, afraid of nothing but their own passions, on 
guard against being caught unaware by their own sudden 
impulses and so getting their grapple upon life in firm-set 
institutions, some reverence for the laws themselves have 
made, some patience, not passionate force, to change them when 
they will, some civic manhood firm against the crowd. Litera- 
ture, ladies and gentlemen, is revelation of the human spirit, 
and within the covers of this one book is a whole lot of litera- 
ture, prose and poetry, history and rhapsody, the sober nar- 
ration of the ecstacy of human excitement — things that ring 
in one's ears like songs never to be forgotten. And so I say 
let us never forget that these deep sources, these wells of in- 
spiration, must always be our sources of refreshment and of 
renewal. Then no man can put unjust power upon us. We 
shall live in that chartered liberty in which a man sees the 
things unseen, in which he knows that he is bound for a coun- 

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8 

try in which there are no questions mooted any longer of right 
or wrong. 

Can you imagine a man who clicl not believe these words, 
who did not believe in the future life, standing up and doing 
what has been the heart and center of liberty always — stand- 
ing up before the king himself and saying, " Sir, you have 
Binned and done wrong in the sight of God, and I am His mes- 
senger of judgment to pronounce upon you the condemnation 
of Almighty God. You may silence me, you may send me to 
my reckoning with my Maker, but you can not silence or re- 
verse the judgment." That is what a man feels whose faith 
is rooted in the Bible. And the man whose faith is rooted 
in the Bible knows that reform can not be stayed, that the 
finger of God that moves upon the face of the natious is against 
every man that plots the nation's downfall or the people's de- 
ceit; that these men are simply groping and staggering in their 
ignorance to a fearful day of judgment; and that whether one 
generation witnesses it or not the glad day of revelation and 
of freedom will come in which men will sing by the host of the 
coming of the Lord in His glory, and all of those will be for- 
gotten—those little, scheming, contemptible creatures that for- 
got the image of God and tried to frame men according to the 
image vl the evil one. _ _ 

You may remember that allegorical narrative m the Old 
Testament of those who searched through one cavern after 
another cutting the holes in the walls and going into the secret 
places when; all sorts of noisome things were worshipped. 
Men do not dare to let the sun shine in upon such things and 
upon such occupations and worships. And so I say there will 
be no hair to the great movement of the armies of reform until 
men forget their God, until they forget this charter of their 
liberty Let no man suppose that progress can be divorced 
from religion or that there is any other platform for the min- 
isters oi reform than the platform written in the utterances of 
our Lord and Savior. . 

America was born a Christian nation. America was born to 
exempliry that devotion to the elements of righteousness which 
are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a very simple thing to ask of 
vou I ask of every man and woman in this audience that 
from this night on they will realize that part of the destiny of 
America lies in their daily perusal of this great book of reve- 
lations—that if they would see America free and pure they 
will make their own spirits free and pure by this baptism of 
the Holy Scripture, 
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